Dumbware®

May 11th, 1996 Posted in Anecdotes, Blog Posts, Essays, Rants

My company has something like 20 technologies, 19 of which we never use. I’ve told you stories before about phoning people about some of these things, only to find they work out of a small room in Arkansas and haven’t been called since 1983.

The owner of our company recently, completely out of the blue, remembered the name of one of these technologies that he’d bought seven years ago, and asked what had been done so far to sell it. The answer, naturally: not a single goddamn thing. But since this doesn’t sound very proactive, every executive threw a lot of paper around in an effort to smokescreen our inadequacy, running around the office designing spreadsheets and saying “I see value here!”

For reasons I don’t fully comprehend, I got pulled into one of these meetings today — a “down and dirty” overview of the product and discussion of the next steps towards its North American implementation. The product — let’s call it Dumbware® — assesses behavioral competencies (think one of those online EQ tests, and about as inaccurate).

Over the course of the overview, it became gradually clear that the main reason no one had championed this product was because it doesn’t actually work. It crashes on Windows and only works in DOS. Over seven years, we’ve also lost the source code needed to fix it. Plus, we already HAVE behavioral software — let’s call it Moronsoft® — so there isn’t even any need for a second one.

So mostly I just nodded and smiled and, like everyone else, agreed to pretend none of these problems existed so we could craft some BS go-forward plan, cover our asses with the owner of Staff Co., then hide the useless technology behind a shelf for another seven years, at which point he’d remember he owned it again. I think I even said “I see value here” at the meeting, even though I did not, in fact, see value, there or anywhere else.

As we went through the demonstration, the speaker pointed to about twenty behavioral “profiles” that’d already been made to showcase Dumbware®’s features. Twenty Staff Co. employees had volunteered to take an hour-long test, after which Dumbware® had compiled all their character traits into its patented Dumbware® DOS database. All this effort had been exerted mainly for the purposes of the demonstration I was attending — why they hadn’t just made up names I have no idea.

Anyway, the speaker tried to show us how to make something called a “job template” with Dumbware®. How it worked was, you picked which character traits would be best-suited to whatever job you were interviewing for. You could then match it against the database of applicants and pull out the best match. This is the theory, anyway. Because the program was useless stool, though, every time the woman demonstrating Dumbware®’s uses tried to create a template for the “ideal” employee, Dumbware® stalled.

Eventually she got frustrated of fiddling with the program while a room full of people watched her, and just selected all the default settings. In other words, she ran a search on baseline average people — 5/10 in every single behavioral category (adaptability, exuberance, etc.)

“Alright,” she explained with an exasperated sigh. “So pretend we’ve just created a template for the ideal employee. Obviously this ISN’T the template for an ideal employee, it’s just the default setting. So we take this group here,” she says, grabbing the twenty Staff Co. employee files, “and drag them over here, and voila!” she said, not even looking at the screen. “You can see, obviously, that these employee competencies will give us poor matches against the template, in which case we’d keep looking.”

However, what HAPPENED was, over 17 of the employees got an A+ ranking match with the template. Meaning that our company’s employees were completely identical to the most middle-of-the-road, unexceptional, five-out-of-ten-in-everything employees in existence.

Slow mounting horror from the presenter. “Well, let’s just pretend that was a poor fit, so I can show you what happens next,” she soldiered on.